Acoustic contest win leads to Six Market Blvd.'s first album

Six Market Blvd. isn’t a street, but more like an intersection where four dreams converged in Stephenville.

The Texas country band is made up of frontman Clayton Landau, lead guitarist Josh Serrato, bassist/singer Ben Hussey; and drummer Dallas Neal. They return to Amarillo on Friday for a show at Midnight Rodeo.

The band members met on the Stephenville music scene, each taking their turn on stage at whatever club had an open mic night. They all found they shared a dream of making music. Little did they know how fast that dream would come true, or that it would mean putting other responsibilities on hold until they could find out exactly where the Blvd. would take them. They’ve been together since 2008.

“We knew each other through the music scene,” Landau said. “We found out that we all had the same interests in what we wanted to do and one thing just led to another.”

It all began with an acoustic contest in Fort Worth. The band won, and that got their first foot in the recording studio door. The prize for first place was a chance to record one song with producer Bart Rose at the Fort Worth Sound recording studio.

After recording the single, Rose agreed to produce the band’s independent debut album, “Running On Seven,” which produced two hit singles on the Texas Music chart, “Man Alive” and “Misery And Me.” Rose also produced the band’s most recent album, “Shake It Down.”

“Shake It Down” has been shaking things up on the Texas music scene. The band’s sophomore album, released in May, came out with a vengeance. The album debuted on the Billboard country albums chart at No. 42, No. 22 on Heatseekers and No. 1 on Heatseekers Regional South Central. “Shake It Down” also hit No. 5 on the iTunes country chart.

The first single from the album, “Say It,” is holding steady in the top 20 of the Texas Music chart.

Landau, 26, said the band wasn’t feeling the sophomore curse when it was time to record “Shake It Down.”

Instead, the guys had learned not only from their first experiences in the recording studio, but also what they had learned on the road.

“We were seasoned a little more from playing on the road and we had more of an idea of what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it,” Landau said. “We also knew how much time we were going to spend on recording it. We took more time than we did last time and put the songs in there exactly how we wanted it, piece by piece and tone by tone.”